Normally laissez faire types don't cheer when they hear that a distinguished
and well-respected company has fallen on hard times but in the case of
Smith & Wesson, I made an exception. This elation wasn't due to the
piss poor quality of its products; though that probably shouldn't be overlooked.
To wit,

"Why would you get a Smith & Wesson when you can get a Ruger?"
asked Joel Miller, friend, gun nut and commentary editor for WorldNetDaily.com,
in a phone interview recently.

Nor should my outburst be blamed on a hatred of firearms. I get along
with guns  and gun owners  just fine thank you, as long as
I'm not staring down the wrong end of the barrel.

The reason for my glee can be found in the first few lines of a
Jan. 29 piece by Matt Bai on MSNBC.com:

"Smith's vaunted handgun line was easily the biggest seller at Romanoff's
Pittsburgh-area store, Ace Sporting Goodsuntil last March. That's
when the 149-year-old gunmaker signed a stunning agreement with the Feds
to get out from under lawsuits, promising to impose strict new rules on
all its dealers.

"Now those who wanted to keep selling Smith guns would have to keep
computerized records of every sale and store all their gunsnot just
Smithsin some kind of vault. And they'd have to limit their customers
to one gun every two weeks."

Consequently, Smith & Wesson's sales, er, shot right through the
floor. Out of desperation, S&W has since scaled back on its demands
but most gun dealers aren't having any.

"Romanoff says there's no way he can keep selling Smiths if he has
to accept the company's terms," writes Bai.

The reason for Romanoff's reluctance is that gun buyers do not like being
pushed by one manufacturer into accepting more limits on what many of
them believe to be an inalienable right.

To understand why S&W was willing to risk alienating its loyal customer
base, look back at the political climate of 2000.

In the wake of the mammoth jury awards and the settlement of the state
attorneys general with big tobacco, Bill Clinton, the NAACP and every
liability lawyer in the republic threatened to bring the gun industry
to its knees. Gun manufacturers' deadly products were killing children!
and therefore must be stopped.

And the forecast didn't look much better. The fanatical Al Gore was seen
as a nigh inevitable successor to the current cigar-chomping, duck-hunting,
anti-tobacco, anti-gun president. Gore's ascension would mean at the least
that various lawsuits would be allowed to bleed gun manufacturers to death.

Given those gruesome odds, rather than fight it S&W decided that
if it rolled over first it could curry favor with the government, gain
immunity from lawsuits and perhaps have an edge on supplying cops with
guns.

But once this once-great Titan rolled over, gun owners and the NRA decided
it was the better part of valor not to play dead. They threw their support
behind one Gov. George W. Bush, who had signed concealed carry legislation
and prohibited Texas cities from suing gun manufacturers for damages related
to gun violence.

For their part, other gun makers both refused to sign onto the government's
agreement and, reports Bai, "[handgun manufacturer] Taurus started
giving away an NRA membership with every new gun, just to underscore its
commitment to gun rights."

So, fairly or unfairly, S&W found itself isolated from its own customers
and on the losing side of a rather vicious election cycle. And rather
than back out of the deal with the government, S&W is still attempting
to get dealers to go along with a watered-down version of its now all-but-obsolete
agreement.